By 
The talented Philadelphia Eagles are once again failing to meet expectations, and now they’ve made a change. Defensive coordinator Juan Castillo has been fired during the team’s bye week and defensive backs coach Todd Bowles is set to take over. Will that get the Eagles back on track? Well, defensive tackle Cullen Jenkins knows they have a whole lot more to work on. Cullen Jenkins joined Michael Barkann and Ike Reese on WIP in Philadelphia to discuss the state of the Eagles after a tough loss to Detroit and with defensive coordinator Juan Castillo out as well as the team’s tendency to repeat the same mistakes.
On Sunday’s collapse against Detroit:
“That’s a tough loss there. It’s a hard one to swallow and we’ve gotta take it up this week.”
On the team continuing to make the same mistakes:
“Whether we won or not, I was still seeing a lot of the same things going on out there — things that we should be correcting by now. We’re going into the sixth week of the season and you have to start to see the improvement happening and the things that the team needs to be working on or your focus is starting to come together. So I think there has to be more of a sense of urgency on our part to start to get these things corrected and adjusted.”
On the temperature of the locker room right now:
“We’re definitely still a team. There’s no finger-pointing going on. As a defense and a defensive line, we look at it as we had an opportunity to win the game at the end and we didn’t. And that’s something that we put on ourselves. … We’re feeling the heat; we’re starting to get a lot of criticism. Everybody wants to talk about the lack of sacks or whatever, and any person that has pride in their job doesn’t want to be critiqued. And we’re putting it on our shoulders to go out there and get this stuff turned around.”
On opposing offenses (particularly Pittsburgh) scheming to prevent the Philly pass rush from getting to the quarterback:
“I had more double-teams between the run and the pass in that game than I’ve ever had in my career. Stuff like that, we’re getting schemed by a lot of teams, and the average person doesn’t realize what’s going on. But a lot of these teams are leaving seven, eight guys at a time in to block, just to keep us from getting pressure on the quarterback.”
On if he thinks the defense should send more rushers to compensate for that:
“As D-linemen you’ve got that pride going. You always want to feel like you can do it with your front four all the time and we’ve got some of the best rushers in the game on our line. … Whenever you get to times like this, or tough times, you know you can’t be opposed to help. And that’s something that obviously we’ve been talking about and we’ll continue to talk about. We’ll see how it goes, but for us, we’ve just gotta figure out a way to get there.”
Comments